Voting systems have changed a lot in Eurovision these last few years. In 2016, the scores of the juries and the televotes were split. Last year, the way jury’s tops were merged into a common ranking was changed. And this year, the presentation of the televote was made more suspenseful. With all those modifications, one might wonder : how would it all look if things worked like they did 10 years ago?
In this article, we will use the system used between 2009 and 2012. This may explain the possible differences you could notice between our work and other “old system” rankings posted online.
This Sunday, we have calculated the 2009-2012 scores of the Grand Final with the raw data from the official Eurovision Song Contest website. As such, the jury rankings were calculated like they were before 2018. The results from San Marino only took into account the votes of the San Marinese jury, and since the Belarussian jury was dismissed before the final, the results from Belarus are those of the televotes.
The results
Interestingly, in the old system, the Dutch victory is clearer than in the actual results. Indeed, the margin between The Netherlands and Italy, originally of 27 points, become as wide as 46 points. It’s almost twice bigger, when there are on the contrary half as many points being distributed.
With Duncan winning neither the jury votes nor the televote (although, and we shall cover it in a later article, The Netherlands would have won the jury vote with the system used before 2018), and a short margin between 1st and 2nd place, one could expect the conversion towards the old results to challenge his winner status, like it did for Jamala in 2016, where the old system would have made Australia the winner.
Instead, the opposite happened. This appeared quite clearly in the process of converting the results. For a lot of countries, The Netherlands appeared in the Top 5 of both the jury and the televote, but the rest of one’s top 5 did not necessarily appear in the other. This way, “Arcade” would remain high in the combined top, when other songs would fall. For example, the Norwegian jury ranked The Netherlands 5th (4th with the current system), and the televote, 3rd, but when both were combined, Duncan ended up 2nd of the Norwegian Top 25, earning 10 points. That is because juror favorites like North Macedonia or the Czech Republic were cancelled or brought down by the televote.
Two other things are of interest. First, several country have obviously changed placings, including Norway which would have entered the Top 3, or France, which would have lost five places and fall under San Marino. The full ranking differences are shown below. The second interesting fact is that the United Kingdom would have received the dreaded nul points. In an alternative world where the old system would have continued to run after 2015, this would have been the second last place for the UK in a row.
What do you think of the old results? Do you prefer them to the real results? Are your favourites better off with it or without it this year? Tell us more in the comments below or on social media at @escxtra!
